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Staffers in charge of HPE's UK IT outsourcing face redundo in April

A life post-HPE beckons for 780 techies

Around a quarter of Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s current IT Outsourcing staff are expected to be made redundant at end of next month, according to company insiders.

As we exclusively revealed on Friday, 780 ITO workers are among 1,000 heads in the UK Enterprise Services division that were told their jobs are at risk.

Sources have claimed the departures will happen at the end of April, though HPE was not specific on dates when it first told employees about the intended overhaul.

“Some of these jobs will be transferred to [HPE Delivery Centres in] Newcastle and Erskine if they need to stay in the UK for contractual reasons,” said one contact.

The company is understood to be recruiting some heads for those two sites, “probably grads to keeps the costs down,” said a source, “so all the years of knowledge will be lost.”

“Jobs that can be done from any location will be moved to lower cost countries, this will be the majority of the 780,” an ITO staffer claimed.

HPE is consolidating its service centres across the UK. There are twenty such major sites, including Lytham, Warrington, Swansea, Sheffield and Bracknell. The ITO unit provides work on behalf of a bunch of customers, including the Department for Work & Pensions, and some might not approve of services being delivered from offshore.

In documents seen by The Register last week, Maurice Mattholie, ITO veep for the UK and MEMA cluster, said the firm had started collective consultation with the UK Works Council and Trade Union reps on 26 February.

He said ITO needs to “create a more efficient and accountable organisation to ensure a healthy long term sustainable business, with a competitive cost structure.”

Mattholie revealed “up to 780 positions within ITO will be impacted”.

HPE is not the only major vendor to carve up its services workforce. IBM has put 1,352 UK workers in Global Technology Services at risk of redundancy, ahead of longer-term intent to offshore up to 80 per cent of the work by the end of 2017.

The latest redundancies are part of HPE's wider corporate restrucutre that involves getting rid of 30,000 employees in the next few years, some of whom work in higher labour cost countries.

The company isn't going as far as IBM, and will retain 40 per cent of services work in the UK long-term. HP is understood to have 900 open vacancies locally, of which 600 are in the Enterprise Services sub. ®